The Case for Old Ideas
November 20, 2001
Most
people who clamor for new ideas have never given old ideas a
chance. They assume that the old ideas have already been tried and found wanting
by whom, they arent exactly sure so they dismiss them as
ancient, outmoded, or medieval. Such
labels are supposed to settle, or preclude, argument.
Thus we are told, on all sides, that the Taliban
are medieval. Only a fool could take this for a reason to oppose the
Taliban. It assumes that all medieval things were the same thing; that medieval
Islam and medieval Christianity were more or less identical. This would have come
as a surprise to the Muslims and Christians of the Middle Ages, who thought they
had serious disagreements.
For that matter, medieval Christianity boiled
with controversy. Any first-year student of medieval philosophy learns that very
quickly. The difference between medieval and modern men is that medieval men
debated over which doctrines were true. They never assumed that the new was
necessarily superior to the old, or vice versa.
During the Renaissance, there were lively
literary debates over whether the ancients were superior to the moderns. Was
Shakespeare as great as Ovid? Was Ben Jonson as great as Aristophanes? The
debaters on both sides argued from merit, not age. They believed there were
permanent criteria for deciding such questions. They would have thought it absurd
to take for granted the superiority of any period, including their own.
Our own age is so silly, so uncritical, that it
ignores the most elementary distinctions of truth and logic. It exalts the recent
and fashionable and assumes that everything old has been superseded like the
Model T. A modern university is less the custodian of a heritage than a cauldron of
fads liberalism, feminism, multiculturalism, and so forth. Whatever
isnt progressive must be reactionary and
therefore ineligible for tolerance. Its pet fads, as every campus conservative soon
discovers, are not open to debate.
Yet the New Ideas of the twentieth century
are showing their age. Until recently, at least, and maybe even now, many college
professors have insisted on treating Marxism as a New Idea, though every state
that has adopted it as a governing philosophy has produced only terror and misery.
Other New Ideas, such as those of John Maynard Keynes, have lost their luster and
survive only as bad habits survive.
One of the distinctive traits of the
modern mind is its insuperable prejudice against the past. The very word
modern has become a term of praise. The Old is Bad, the New is Good. We
mustnt listen to the Old; it has nothing to teach us. So the modern man,
living in fear of being behind the times, prefers any new
intellectual fad to actually reading the ancient Aristotle or the medieval Aquinas.
C.S. Lewis used to urge his students at Oxford
and Cambridge to read all the old books they could not because the old
authors were always right, but because they at least made different errors from
those of modern thinkers. By studying ancient and medieval writers, Lewis knew,
the student could achieve a certain detachment from the pressures of the present;
he could see his own environment, the modern world, with fresh eyes.
That mental detachment is one of the greatest
blessings an education can bestow. Without it, we are doomed to be manipulated by
all the worst forces of the modern world. We live in an age of politics and its
handmaiden, state propaganda. We cant isolate ourselves from these things,
which relentlessly seek to control the masses of people and to reduce all of us to
passive mass-men. In defense of our own humanity, we desperately need to breed
the internal resource of the independent mind. This is the task of a lifetime, not
just a four-year curriculum.
Orwells Nineteen
Eighty-Four remains the great parable of the modern society in which the
individual becomes a mere product of the state. That individual is so thoroughly
conditioned by state propaganda that he accepts even its self-contradictions
without question and feels only the emotions it demands at a given moment.
The books lesson is that when your
mind is a vacuum, the state will fill it. With what? With New Ideas, of course.
Joseph Sobran
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